May 24th 2005

Britain is obsessed with political correctness. Now, before you nod enthusiastically in agreement and start dusting off the hilarious rubber gollywog hidden away in your loft, I'm not referring to the necessary and useful corrections to prejudice that have been made in the name of PC over the years. What I mean is: Britain is obsessed with the idea that PC is a conspiracy, a hurricane of embittered, lefty oppression determined to strip us all of the right to speak as we find. It has resulted in a terrible, cultural black hole in which only Marks Thomas and Steele are funny, goes the argument, and to make up for decades of imperialism, all white Britons should leap over the cliffsof Dover in a futile but poignant lemming-style suicide/apology.

And yet, not everything that happens to us that we don't like is because political correctness has gone mad. Some of it is because things need changing. Brace yourself - but some of the old ideas that we call "traditions" are rubbish. The clearer, better, computer-generated BBC weather reports are not a PC trick. Neither is the fact that both Julian Clary and Graham Norton are on BBC1 on the same night (it's a mistake, but PC it ain't). Some gays and Asians and Muslims and disabled people pay the licence fee too, so would the straight, white, able-bodied, Christian, PC-phobic majority just shut up for a bit? (Don't worry, another ethnically cleansed Only Fools and Horses or EastEnders will be along in moment or two.) Accusations of politically correct thought control have become a pathetic and transparent excuse for lazy racists, sexists and Islamophobes the land over. Challenging PC has become a game of chicken for bigots - daring each other to run out into the busy PC motorway and say something stupid before dashing back for cover. Who will dare to go the furthest without actually invading Poland? The Tories? Ukip? The Daily Mail? An excellent comic by the name of Chris Addison has said, "You can tell people who read the Daily Mail because they follow every stupid thing they say with the phrase '... but I suppose that's not politically correct', and think that makes it OK to say whatever they want."

Thus the Mail's coverage yesterday of the war crimes trial of the British army Colonel Jorge Mendonca suggested that he has been "dragged into a politically correct witchhunt". Tssk. Typical of the PC brigade - one Iraqi man gets beaten to death and they are down on you like a ton of righteous liberal bricks! The chap wasn't even English! (I should point out that Mendonca was allegedly only in charge of a group of British soldiers who beat a civilian to death, he didn't actually beat a civilian to death himself.)

The magazine the Week has a column called PC Watch, which this week bemoans the fact that the National Trust has stopped allowing children to collect eggs and feed goats at Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire, in case they pick up germs. That's not PC, that's parasitic "no win, no fee" litigation companies continuing to put a price on every stubbed toe, achy neck or wet fart they can get their hands on. It's greedy insurance companies hiking the premiums every time the lawyers get a win and a fee.

Political correctness is as exploitable as any other progressive ideal, but its aim is to stifle the incessant noise of those who flap their careless lips without a thought about those they might offend and why that might be important. PC exists to balance out the loudest voices, who assume that the things they are used to are somehow sacred or (God forbid) "traditional", just because no one's had the sense or the balls to change them.